‘Treat government like your banker’, universities advised

Universities should manage relations with government in much the way families manage relations with financial institutions, according to the chief executive of New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Commission.

“In your household, you wouldn’t really want to have a shit relationship with your bank,” Tim Fowler told the THE Campus Live ANZ event at the University of Newcastle. “You might not like the way the bank works…but you’ve still got to have a good relationship with the bankers because you’ve got to keep going back.

“It’s the same with universities and the government. I think we need to try and get past the rhetoric.”

Mr Fowler was part of a panel investigating how universities could “scale up” to meet government objectives, such as Wellington’s pledge to treble renewable energy production and Canberra’s quest to roughly double tertiary education participation by 2050.

He counselled his mostly Australian audience to think long-term and avoid “biting when it’s easy to bite”, despite the government’s disruption of universities’ international education revenue. Instead, administrators should focus on “the value-adds that universities provide to solve problems for the government”.

“Then, all you can really ask in return [is for] government [to] provide you with a stable and predictable environment…to do the work that you do, and fund it. If you can do those things, you’re on the right track.”

Mr Fowler said scaling up university activity was “as much a political question as a financial, logistical and educational one. For governments to underwrite the…scale of change that you’re suggesting [in Australia], it’s frankly going to want to see better outcomes.

“There’s a question of efficiency and effectiveness. Government will be asking all of you to [do] better. It’s not to say that…you’re ineffective or inefficient at the moment, but it’s a case of always pushing the boundaries [and] trying to look at every possible way of improving what you’re doing.”

Swinburne University of Technology vice-chancellor Pascale Quester said it was “somewhat ironic” that “government masters” were asking universities to be more productive “at the same time as everything else in the economy is absolutely unproductive”.

“We’re blamed for the housing crisis when productivity in construction has gone through the floor,” she told the forum. “But somehow the universities have to lift their game [and] be more productive. The irony is not lost on us.”

Professor Quester also took aim at the business world, which she said was quick to criticise universities for failing to produce the right graduates, but slow to come to the table with joint solutions. “When we start talking about dollars, the room is empty before we’ve finished the sentence. They think it should be a government thing.”

She said business representatives often made “polite” offers to lobby the government for more university funding. “I’m a big girl. I can go and lobby myself.

“If [they] really want to deliver value to industry by developing the workforce…you’d think that they would be prepared for an investment.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com